When you own your breath, nobody can steal your peace. ~Author Unknown

What we call ’I’ is just a swinging door, which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. ~Shunryu Suzuki

When the breath wanders the mind also is unsteady. But when the breath is calmed the mind too will be still, and the yogi achieves long life. Therefore, one should learn to control the breath. ~Svatmarama, Hatha Yoga Pradipika

A healthy mind has an easy breath. ~Author Unknown

If you woke up breathing, congratulations! You have another chance. ~Andrea Boydston

Inhale, and God approaches you. Hold the inhalation, and God remains with you. Exhale, and you approach God. Hold the exhalation, and surrender to God. ~Krishnamacharya

Breathing is the greatest pleasure in life. ~Giovanni Papini

Smile, breathe and go slowly. ~Thích Nhất Hạnh

Breath is Spirit. The act of breathing is Living. ~Author Unknown

Ancestral Teacher Qiu said, "If the breathing is at all unsettled, life is not your own." ~"Heaven and Earth," c. Ming dynasty work Anthology on the Cultivation of Realization by unknown author, translated by Thomas Cleary in Taoist Meditation

For breath is life, and if you breathe well you will live long on earth. ~Sanskrit Proverb

Walking through the house at night is wonderful to me; a symphony of breath, each person a separate instrument as they collectively breathe in time to the metronome of life itself. ~Edwin Leap, www.edwinleap.com

To one who has been long in city pent,
’Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, — to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
~John Keats, Sonnet XIV

He lives most life whoever breathes most air. ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. ~Thích Nhất Hạnh

Focusing on the act of breathing clears the mind of all daily distractions and clears our energy enabling us to better connect with the Spirit within. ~Author Unknown

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies. ~Erich Fromm

As a fire blazes brightly when the covering of ash over it is scattered by the wind, the divine fire within the body shines in all its majesty when the ashes of desire are scattered by the practice of pranayama. ~B.K.S. Iyengar

You know that our breathing is the inhaling and exhaling of air. The organ that serves for this is the lungs that lie round the heart, so that the air passing through them thereby envelops the heart. Thus breathing is a natural way to the heart. And so, having collected your mind within you, lead it into the channel of breathing through which air reaches the heart and, together with this inhaled air, force your mind to descend into the heart and to remain there. ~Nicephorus the Solitary

Breathing, according to me, corresponds to taking charge of one’s own life. ~Luce Irigaray, Between East and West

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart: I am, I am, I am. ~Sylvia Plath

Freedom is strangely ephemeral. It is something like breathing; one only becomes acutely aware of its importance when one is choking. ~William E. Simon

In this very breath that we now take lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us. ~Peter Matthiessen

The path of humanity is always coordinated with heaven and earth in the alternation of movement and stillness. Human energy is always in communion with heaven and earth in the alteration of exhalation and inhalation. ~"Heaven and Earth," c. Ming dynasty work Anthology on the Cultivation of Realization by unknown author, translated by Thomas Cleary in Taoist Meditation

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life’s plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life. ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Fear is excitement without the breath. ~Fritz Perls

When I stopped to pay attention to where my breathing was deep and settled, the truth began to emerge from the mist. ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again. ~L. Frank Baum

The practice is simply this: keep coming back to your breath during the day. Just take a moment. This will give your mind a steadiness and your breath a gracefulness.... There’s so much to let go of, isn’t there? Your nostalgia and your regrets. Your fantasies and your fears. What you think you want instead of what is happening right now. Breathe. ~Rodney Yee, Yoga: The Poetry of the Body

Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life? ~Mary Oliver

What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places? ~Mary Oliver

What art offers is space — a certain breathing room for the spirit. ~John Updike

We too should make ourselves empty, that the great soul of the universe may fill us with its breath. ~Laurence Binyon

Learn how to exhale, the inhale will take care of itself. ~Carla Melucci Ardito

Let the air become you, and then leave you. Forgive each breath because although it abandons you, every single time, it is also brings you life. A man who cannot forgive the air has no chance of living. ~Edmond Manning, King Perry

There is one way of breathing that is shameful and constricted. Then, there’s another way: a breath of love that takes you all the way to infinity. ~Rumi

Breathe. Let go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure. ~Oprah Winfrey

The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again. Erma Bombeck

In an underdeveloped country, don’t drink the water; in a developed country, don’t breathe the air. ~Changing Times magazine

The wisest one-word sentence? Breathe. ~Terri Guillemets

We live in an ocean of air like fish in a body of water. By our breathing we are attuned to our atmosphere. If we inhibit our breathing we isolate ourselves from the medium in which we exist. In all Oriental and mystic philosophies, the breath holds the secret to the highest bliss. ~Alexander Lowen

I love to breathe. Oxygen is sexy! ~Kris Carr

To live is not breathing it is action. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Angels are all around us, all the time, in the very air we breathe. ~Quoted in The Angels’ Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994